Bluelight Census 2018

In partnership with Global Drug Survey, Bluelight is launching its own census. That's right, we want to know a bit more about our community. Things like demographics and drug use characteristics. And whether you use harm reduction information from website to inform what decisions you make.

This year, Global Drug Survey included an item asking whether people had accessed certain drug-related websites ever and in the last 7 days. So by partnering with GDS, we will be able to draw the sample of people who report using Bluelight in the last 7 days from the larger sample, and produce a short report on their data.

We will post that report to Bluelight's front page by February 2018. The report will be short, focusing on demographics, drug use statistics, rates of harm (e.g. emergency attendance), and use of harm reduction strategies.

You do not have to complete every section of GDS to be part of the census. Please, instead of closing your browser because of a specific section, we'd rather you skipped the section and went to the next one. This is because there are some important demographic questions close to the end that we'd like people to answer.

Your responses are completely anonymous. Bluelight will only report results in totals or aggregates, never for any one individual.

Apart from age, gender and country, none of the questions in GDS are 'forced' or 'compulsory'. Please just skip any question if you do not want to answer it. Feel free to note any concerns - you can PM me on Bluelight to express any concerns about the survey, and I'll feed those back to the GDS team. Or you can simply post comments below.

The Bluelight census findings will not report anything related to drug sourcing, as this would contravene our guidelines. So please don't be concerned about answering questions on these topics as we won't be reporting them for the census (but any responses you do make will be included in the broader GDS results, not attributed to Bluelight).

Great to get your comments. Yes it's true that GDS does not have a special section for heroin; this is an oversight which we will be changing next year. It's because the survey was originally targeted at clubbers/dance music festival attendees etc and typically there is low opioid use in these populations, though I realise that has changed as well.

We do ask whether you've used a range of opioids so the census will still report on opioid use trends for Bluelight.

Thanks for the feedback and thanks for completing the survey. Looking forward to compiling Bluelight results.